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Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one

#91

Post by panarky »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #59

I am tempted to paraphrase the Elephant man, "I am not a sigmoid function, I am a human being!" in response to that headline :-) That said, I think it is great that they are trying to characterize this sort of thing. The second law of institutions is that every process must require more people to execute than can conspire without being detected[1]. But relying so much on humans in one way or another is going to gum i…

> every process must require more people to execute than can conspire without being detected

Step 1 - let users report posts that are false

Step 2 - human fact checkers investigate user reports

Step 3 - rely more on users who report posts as false that really are false, and less on users who report posts as false that really are true

Step 4 - repeat step 3 but for the fact checkers themselves

Step 5 - train an ML model to automate more of the fact checking work

Re: Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one

#92

Post by hevi_jos »

igravious wrote: post #83
danielblazevski wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good intentions? I would even argue against that. I find it hard to believe facebook has good intentions with this. Remember, Mr. Zuckerberg is alleged to have called Mr. Trump the night of the election to congratulate him. Let’s stop pretending like the tech industry is full of good intentioned people making an “oops”

As a European I want to make it vocally known that in my opinion US politics has in recent times almost irrevocably poisoned HackerNews; and that is coming from someone who has been on this site eight years. One _cannot_ in _any way_ infer a lack of good intentions from a single alleged phone call. Besides, if I were a titan of industry I would do my best to call whoever the hell got elected president the night of th…

Agreed. The US is supposedly a democracy, in which people will respect the election made by others. They were proud of its System. Now it looks they have forgotten the principles of democracy as they take it for granted.

The US has become bipolar, the Media has become hysterical, using war propaganda to infer the worst intentions and personal qualities to the adversaries, instead of using Truth using prejudices, condemning people without evidence or counsel for the defense.

Re: Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one

#93

Post by WiseWeasel »

macintux wrote: post #64
seymour1 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the parent commenter's issue does imply a solution! Just add "Biased/slanted coverage" to the list of reasons to report, and now your "Fake News" section is much higher signal to noise.

Everything is biased. True objectivity is effectively impossible, and it's not even clear that perfect objectivity is desirable. People will report any negative coverage of their favorite party/politician as biased, especially now that the current U.S. president hoists that banner every day.

Certain content might be more or less blatant about it, and as seymour1 suggests, gathering that additional data and cleaning up the currently actionable data really only has upsides.

One avenue would be to put those who report the same things as biased in cohorts, to be shown or not shown similar content.

Re: Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one

#94

Post by chrchang523 »

WiseWeasel wrote: post #30
mic47 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for FB anti-spam team, and believe me, nobody trusted user feedback absolutely (i.e. it's good to send to review, but not automatically take down). I guess that with fake news the signal to noise ratio is even worse. The whole article sounds more like focusing on one implementation details of review queue prioritization (i.e. what is the difference of definition of "fake news" for this user vs Facebook's def…

To me, fake news also includes slanted coverage of true events (i.e. covering events in such a way as to convey a sponsored message, biased polling methodology, etc.). That encompasses statistically approaching 100% of trashy sources you’re likely to encounter as 'sponsored content', as well as a healthy portion of more established sources' content. I'd be likely to report a majority as fake news in perfectly good fa…

Exactly. A statistically literate person should be able to make reasonably accurate inferences about the broader distribution of some event class by reading about the most newsworthy events and extrapolating (taking into account that newsworthy events should be among the highest-impact in the class). However, practically all mainstream news sources fail this basic test. You can't get very close to an accurate picture of reality these days without reading e.g. individual bloggers who dedicate a significant portion of their lives to highlighting relevant patterns that mainstream news sources on both 'sides' are intentionally omitting or burying.

Re: Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one

#95

Post by j-c-hewitt »

As they will hire biased 'fact'-checkers, you will wind up with people getting greylisted by stating controversial but popular positions (e.g. "eating meat is immoral" / "raising taxes lowers economic productivity" / "welfare programs create perverse incentives" / "sales taxes are regressive" / "Islam is an inherently expansionist religion / "Islam has bloody borders" / "Christianity is inherently misogynist" / "Abortion is murder" / "Republicans are Nazis in discount menswear" / "I voted for Donald Trump and I support our president").

What you will be left with is what many people originally flocked to the internet to avoid: the 'MSM echo chamber' of anodyne center-left opinion against which no dissent will be tolerated.

Re: Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one

#96

Post by danielblazevski »

lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #90
igravious wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a European I want to make it vocally known that in my opinion US politics has in recent times almost irrevocably poisoned HackerNews; and that is coming from someone who has been on this site eight years. One _cannot_ in _any way_ infer a lack of good intentions from a single alleged phone call. Besides, if I were a titan of industry I would do my best to call whoever the hell got elected president the night of th…

I hate the "identity politics" meme. What is policy that effects humans but "identity politics". From privacy oriented individuals concerned with data collection to social minorities concerned about prosecution any administration is going effect you based on identity. For racial and sexual minorities, in the current US climate especially, it's hard to avoid "identity politics" when you have literal mobs with torches…

well said :-)

Re: Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one

#97

Post by nradov »

Tarq0n wrote: post #34
vorpalhex wrote: post #16

> Because Facebook forwards posts that are marked as false to third-party fact-checkers, she said it was important to build systems to assess whether the posts were likely to be false to make efficient use of fact-checkers’ time. This seems like a "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" kind of thing. On one hand, I understand not wanting to forward every single story when a troll is mass-reporting, on the o…

Do you check your spam filter to see what it's been filtering still? Text classification has gotten very reliable over the last decade, the process just needs to be transparent. Valve also does something similar with their anti-cheat system called overwatch. A machine learning system selects which replays are most likely to result in a conviction, then those replays are shown to human peer-reviewers who must come to…

Yes I check my spam folder frequently. The Gmail spam filter has many false positives. In the real world text classification is still too inaccurate to rely upon for anything important.

Re: Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one

#99

Post by turtlecloud »

mipmap04 wrote: post #33
vorpalhex wrote: post #16

> Because Facebook forwards posts that are marked as false to third-party fact-checkers, she said it was important to build systems to assess whether the posts were likely to be false to make efficient use of fact-checkers’ time. This seems like a "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" kind of thing. On one hand, I understand not wanting to forward every single story when a troll is mass-reporting, on the o…

What would be a viable alternative? I don't think they can just ignore the issue and, as you mention, can't review every single story. They'll have to rely on some form of sampling for the reviewers. Would it be better to just take a truly random sample of all reports? I don't think that would be very effective given the number of publications they have to review. Do you let users review the content for veracity? See…

The alternative is to nationalize Facebook. Facebook is destroying our society and if the government doesn’t realize it yet, then Facebook will become our government.

Re: Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one

#100

Post by bluecalm »

danielblazevski wrote: post #43
vorpalhex wrote: post #16

> Because Facebook forwards posts that are marked as false to third-party fact-checkers, she said it was important to build systems to assess whether the posts were likely to be false to make efficient use of fact-checkers’ time. This seems like a "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" kind of thing. On one hand, I understand not wanting to forward every single story when a troll is mass-reporting, on the o…

Good intentions? I would even argue against that. I find it hard to believe facebook has good intentions with this. Remember, Mr. Zuckerberg is alleged to have called Mr. Trump the night of the election to congratulate him. Let’s stop pretending like the tech industry is full of good intentioned people making an “oops”

Calling a democratically chosen leader to congratulate him? Travesty!
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